5.1.1: Prometheus' Punishment

And ready-witted Prometheus he bound with inextricable bonds, cruel chains, and drove a shaft through his middle, and set on him a long-winged eagle, which used to eat his immortal liver; but by night the liver grew as much again everyway as the long-winged bird devoured in the whole day.¹

Prometheus, Grecian titan, was punished for a series of tricks he played on Zeus. First told in Hesiod’s Theogony, the “trick at Mecone” involves an arranged meeting between humans and the gods, to determine how sacrifices were to be divided. Prometheus, slaying an ox and arranging its remains two piles—one of the ox’s meat and the other its bones and fat artfully arranged—invited Zeus to choose one of the offerings. When the Olympian chose the pile of bones, he realized that he had been tricked. As an act of retribution, Zeus stole fire from humans, only for Prometheus to steal it back with a fennel stalk. The titan was punished for his transgressions, impaled on a rock and left for an eagle to eat his liver every day, before the hero Heracles slew the beast.

I start with this narrative to develop a metaphor of the specimen. In Grecian myth knowledge—fire—depends on the embodied punishment of its progenitor—Prometheus. Humans can learn, grow, develop technology, and create art all in relation to this act of punishing. Fire is a gift, one which was given selflessly, and for the benefit of the receiver (0.1.5). Without fire, human ingenuity would be impossible, and thus humans bare a debt to Prometheus and his transgressions. Knowledge is bound to the titan’s torture.

The specimen’s gifted knowledge (0.1.5)—the rhetoric that is cast through its materiality and made possible only because of its history (2.2.2; 2.2.4)—depends also on an act of theft, of disembodiment, of dislocation. Every time a specimen is used for a knowledge argument, it is another act of taking, dismembering that research object from its source, and propping it up for a new purpose. In the introduction, I described why I framed the specimen as a gift. It helped maintain a connection between these otherwise obdurate research objects the people whose bodies were pieced apart (0.1.5; 2.1.4; 2.2.4). These people did not consent to giving this gift, and as a researcher I am obligated to attend to this history, this theft, this open wound (2.4.3).

The specimen is not unlike Prometheus: a thing that gifts knowledge and whose future is to be eternally picked at by knowledge workers. Every new method of analysis, every new discipline that claims its right to the specimen, every new scholar’s position in relation to that specimen, offers new knowledge gifts, all while piecing apart the Titan’s liver again and again and again. So much of medicine’s knowledge, especially historical knowledge, is produced through reclaiming, reframing, reintroducing, or reconstituting an original object. Its knowledge proliferates often at the expense of the subjects who were chained to the rock. And unlike Prometheus, who was eventually saved from his agony, there is no means to relinquish these research objects from their collections (4.2.4).